With year-end planning in full swing, one of the inescapable must-dos is budgeting for the next year’s projects. In wastewater and stormwater management, this means including pipeline inspection as a line item.

Many municipalities are under consent decrees to lessen or put an end to non-point source pollution, and this necessarily has a massive impact on budgets. While normal budgets are determined by tax revenues, consent decree work budgets are driven by what kind of mandates they have issued. Depending on the specific project, sometimes the federal government will help cities find funding to do what they need to do.

If there is a “green” aspect to your project, you may decide to seek funding from an EPA Clean Water Act Nonpoint Source Grant (Section 319 Grants – https://www.epa.gov/nps/319-grant-program-states-and-territories)—Congress amended the Clean Water Act in 1987 to establish EPA’s Section 319 Nonpoint Source Management Program to provide greater federal leadership in focusing state and local nonpoint source efforts. Under Section 319, states, territories, and Indian tribes receive grant money to support a wide variety of activities, including:

technical and financial assistance,

education and training,

technology transfer,

demonstration projects, and

monitoring to assess the success of projects implemented under the grant.

EPA Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF – https://www.epa.gov/cwsrf)— This program is a federal-state partnership that provides communities a permanent, independent source of low-cost financing for a wide range of water quality infrastructure projects:

You may need to be creative in your approach and the way you view your project, when it comes to identifying potential funding sources. Consider asking your local water district for help. Or you may choose to create your project in such a way that it qualifies for funding from other, less obvious sources.

Think about such possibilities as the EPA Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds if you’re anywhere near a coastline.

One of the important steps in choosing the right equipment for your needs is scheduling a field demonstration, so you can see exactly how it behaves in actual use. Don’t settle for a simple show-and-tell from a sales representative, especially if it’s new equipment you’re not familiar with. You don’t want to see how it performs under optimal conditions, which rarely exist in the field. You want to see how it handles the rigors and unexpected turns of a real job.

Once you’ve scheduled your demonstration, what should you expect?

According to Robert Studdard, our Southeast Regional Sales Manager, “A true demo should consist of an actual pipe inspection in normal working conditions. The pipe should be cleaned prior to inspection. The pipe size being worked on should be known in advance, so the crawler can be properly set up”, he says. “And the customer should understand that there are no ‘bulletproof’ systems on the market: meaning that the condition of the pipe, its lack of maintenance, and other factors can and will affect the way the inspection goes.”

All of these real-world possibilities should be explained by the sales rep, and the customer should be wary of too many promises made with no limitations. In other words, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

The need for realistic expectations extends to the length of the inspection distance coverage. Most manufacturers claim that their equipment will go a thousand feet, and it will. However, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Most municipalities and counties go manhole to manhole, somewhere between 300-500 feet per run. So make sure you actually need that run length: Bells and whistles on equipment increase its cost, and you don’t want to pay for something you simply don’t need and probably will never use.

You may also wonder what questions you should ask to complete an accurate and in-depth comparison of all potential equipment solutions. We have created a convenient, downloadable checklist for you to use in making these comparisons. It provides a one-stop, go-to document to allow you to ask all the important questions of each manufacturer or rep, so you can then compare apples to apples, so to speak.

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